Discussions are a good way to encourage students to think critically about your coursework and interact with each other’s ideas. You can create discussions around individual course lessons or for your course in general. As the instructor, you own the discussions. After you start a discussion, you can post comments of your own to guide students.

Note: To promote originality, creativity, and a variety of responses, you can choose Participants must create a thread to view other threads in this forum, which is the post first setting. Students must respond before they can read their classmates' posts. In Standard View, everyone can see all previously created threads in the forum.

More about Discussions, Forums, and Threads

How to Use Blackboard Discussions

Participate in lively discussions to collaborate and share ideas. Use Discussions in the Original Course View video explains the features instructors and students use to interact in Blackboard Learn discussions. After watching the video, open another tab or window, replay the video and follow the instructions to create a discussion forum using in your course.

Journals are a personal space for students to communicate privately with you. Students can also use journals as a self-reflective tool to post their opinions, ideas, and concerns about the course, or discuss and analyze course-related materials. You can create journal assignments that are broad and student-directed as your students reflect on the learning process and document changes in their perceptions and attitudes. Students can describe problems faced and how they solved them. You can also create instructor-directed journal entries that are more formal in nature and that narrow the focus by listing topics for discussion.

Note: The commenting feature in Journals can enable you to provide feedback to students. If you make journals not private, students can comment on each other’s writing and enable collaboration. 

More information about Journals

How to Create and Comment on Journal Entries

Journals give students a personal space for reflection and one-to-one communication with their instructors. This tutorial, Create a Journal Entry in the Original Course View shows students how to create journal entries, save drafts, and post comments.

After watching the video, follow this link for more instructions on How to Create a Journal. Open another tab or window, follow the instructions to create a Journal in your course.

Group work in the online classroom can be an excellent way to create community and provide the opportunity for students to apply new skills and concepts. It also helps students develop strategies that will benefit them in the workplace. Just like in a face-to-face course, however, student collaboration in an online environment requires careful assignment design, student preparation, and team management by the instructor.

More information about groups

How to Create Groups

See a step-by-step quick guide on groups. After reviewing the instructions for creating groups, navigate to your course and follow the instructions on how to create groups.